Posts Tagged ‘built to spill’

Legendary PNW rockers Built to Spill (pictured) are playing the Capitol Hill Block Party in Seattle on July 24th and they’ve decided to let their fans vote on the setlist.The Stranger‘s art and music blog, Line Out, has a poll where you can select your first choice of song. I hope that this will go a long way towards shutting down people who yell out requests.

Jelli.net crowdsources radio. Yes, real radio. This Sunday, June 28th, they’ll have the first of their regular slots on San Francisco’s Live 105. For two hours, starting at 10 pm PST, it’ll be an experiment in the real-time crowdsourcing of radio. You can go to the website and vote on songs to be played, and you can even band together with other listeners to pull songs off the air. It looks like the station streams online too, so you don’t even have to be in the Bay Area to check it out. (via Hypebot)

Boston band Pretty & Nice had a sobering run-in with one of their musical heroes:

This may be the most telling anecdote about modern rock ever: A new band with a seemingly bright future meets one of its idols – a guy signed to a major label with 15 years of storied records and tours under his belt – and he’s managing a Jiffy Lube in Boise, Idaho….

The bright new band: Pretty & Nice, which plays a CD release show for its new album “Get Young” Sunday at Great Scott. The idol: Built To Spill bassist Brett Nelson.

“We met Brett at the Jiffy Lube he manages in Boise.” said Holden Lewis. “I came out from paying and was wondering, ‘Who’s this guy talking about touring?’ The whole interaction was about 30 seconds long, but he came to our show in Boise that night and invited us to their Boston show last month.”

The article focuses how what it means to ‘make it’ in the modern music industry, and how the days of being wildly successful (a là KISS and their ilk) are pretty much over. Hugh Dillon‘s character in Hard Core Logo says of his bandmate, “Billy wants the models and limousines, while I’m happy with hookers and taxicabs,” and it looks like it might be all cabs, no limos from here on out. There are clear parallels to other media, and how they are becoming increasingly niche-oriented: instead of everyone sitting in front of their TV watching Dallas on a major network, we moved to the 500-channel universe, and then to watching clips on YouTube. Music seems to be going in the same direction – instead of relatively few bands that are massive and ubiquitous, there’s a complete ecosystem of bands thriving in a wide range of niches. At least, I hope that’s how it plays out; I really need to keep going to shows and buying CDs, Pretty & Nice’s in particular…